This past month I redesigned the VA Partners Monthly Newsletter. An email newsletter is a powerful lead generation tool, so when taking on the task of redesigning an already successful and proven marketing tool, you need to make sure that your changes actually enhance the performance of the newsletter. Here are a few tips I’ve gathered from my experience.
1. Use Analytics to Support Your Design Changes
At VA Partners, we primarily work with the two most common email marketing platforms: Constant Contact, and MailChimp. Both platforms offer performance analytics that can give you great insight into redesigning your newsletter. These analytics can show you a lot of different stats, however for design purposes, the most important analytic is click-throughs. By looking at past campaigns, you can begin to see what content in your newsletter is most engaging.
Example: For our newsletter, I went back 6 months and created a summary of the number of click-throughs by “content category” (ie. Links to Blog, White Papers, Events, etc.) By doing this, I realized that the links to our blog posts were a very popular piece of the newsletter. So for the redesign, I made sure that these blog links were placed even more prominently on the newsletter to increase the amount of click-throughs in future campaigns.
2. Research Best Practices
There is a lot of content online for newsletter design and optimization, so be sure to take advantage of this. Whether it be research on improving your newsletter’s lead generation capabilities, or you just want to look at other newsletter designs for some inspiration, there is no shortage of material at your disposal. Do some research on best practices before you get too far into your redesign project.
Example: After some digging into online reading behaviour I discovered that a much higher percentage of the reader’s time is spent reading the left side of a web page rather than the right side. In fact, approximately 70% of a reader’s time is spent on the left side as opposed 30% on the right. Using this new found knowledge I made sure that the newsletter was designed accordingly, with engaging content along the left side of the page, easy to see, read and click.
3. Get Colleague’s and Peer Feedback
Even if you’re a solo business owner, chances are you’ve got someone who would take a look at your design and give you some feedback. After I created the first draft of the new design, I enlisted the help of my team. When you’re the only person working, it’s easy to get tunnel vision and miss some areas for improvement. Your colleagues and peers can provide you with great feedback and suggestions. To ensure you’re creating the best design possible, listen to their feedback and incorporate it into the newsletter.
If you’d like to see how our redesign turned out, sign up for our monthly newsletter. It focuses on B2B sales, marketing, and social media for startups and growing businesses.
